Daily Mail Bricks itself in

To those lucky enough not to have been following this story since its bitter beginnings, Samantha Brick is a woman. She wrote an article for the Daily Mail on Tuesday, complaining that other women hate her because she’s too beautiful. The utter irrelevance of the piece, the galling arrogance of the idea, and Ms Brick’s failure to meet the standards of ‘beauty’ for many readers was a red rag to a platoon of bulls. The page was inundated with comments, and thus was born a temporary mini-phenomenon for both traditional and social media.

Now, the ante just keeps getting upped:

The self-parody alert apparently hasn’t gone off at Daily Mail HQ. Or maybe it has, and someone pulled the wires out and stamped on it a few times because the sound it made was just too beautiful for human ears. Even seasoned press disparagers are watching the continued apparently-uncontrolled-but-possibly-self-aware tailspin of the Samantha Brick non-story with a kind of pinch-nosed amusement so, apart from the fact that we’ve not linked to the story directly, they’ve won. The Daily Mail have found the winning formula.

They’ve created a totally bizarre perpetual motion machine of a story that runs entirely on its own perceived notoriety, regardless of the number of meta- prefixes required to explain the situation. I might be wrong, but I think we’ve become meta-meta-meta-interested, in that the most interesting aspect is that meta-meta-interested parties (who recognise the cheap ad-revenue-maximising strategy being employed) still go back for more. If that interests you, it’s time to get a job in a philosophy department. Or at the Guardian.

The Daily Mail is collapsing into an event horizon of navel-gazing recursive reporting which threatens to engulf Twitter, FleetStreet and, shortly, the entire western spiral arm of the galaxy.

And, when half of the Milky Way is torn asunder as an indirect result of them, I think we’d all be justified in hating Samantha Brick for her looks.

3 Responses

One doesn’t need to in this case. The Daily Mail trolling department sits at the centre of a far-reaching web of non-celebrity non-news gossip that seems to exist only to draw the unsuspecting victims back to the Mail’s site for a bit of ad revenue. The sorry fable of Ms. Brick can be found in other daily newspapers, across the internets, and even got an unrepetantly egotistical airing on ITV’s This Morning. It seems that she’s being fast-tracked to J-list celebritydom via the hate-filled route previously used by Rebecca “It’s Friday” Black.

I’d like to say that relying entirely on the BBC for our news feeds we’ve been entirely unaware of all this nonsense, but Ms Brick even managed a mention on Radio 4 on Sunday morning (which would have whizzed happily over our heads had we not seen your piece first).